40 young men; two of them are Native Indians, one isn't. The one that isn't puts the twist on Marcia for some change. He says he Just wants to eat, which seems to Marcia a modest enough wish: she knows a lot of people who want a good deal more. He is pallid and stubble-faced, and he doesn't meet her eyes. To him she's just a sort of broken pay phone, the kind you can shake to make extra quarters come out. The two Indians watch without much expression. They look fed up. They've had it with this city, they've had it with suicide as an option, they've had it with the twentieth century. Or so Marcia supposes. She doesn't blame them: the twentieth century has not been a raving success. At the newsstand she buys a choco- late bar and a True Woman magazine, the first Canadian-made but bad for you, the second an outright Yankee- land betrayal. But she's entitled: she gets enough virtuous eating and reality principle in the rest of her life, so for half an hour she'll play hooky and wreck her blood sugar and read escapist trash. She squashes onto the train with the other wool-swaddled passengers and is adroit enough to get a seat, where she thumbs through the holiday fashions and the diet of the month, licking chocolate from her fingers. Then she settles into a piece entitled, with misplaced assurance, "What Men Really Think." It's all about sex, of course. Marcia has news for them: the sum total of what men really thinkds quite a lot bigger than that. She changes trains, gets off at Union, slogs up the stairs to street level. There's an escalator, but looking at all those slender bodies has made her worried. Eric thinks she has nice thighs; but, then, Eric leads a sheltered life. T HERE are underground mazes downtown, underground shop- ping malls, underground tunnels that can get you from one building to an- other. You could spend the whole win- ter underground, without ever going outside. But Marcia feels a moral obli- gation to deal with winter instead of merely avoiding it. Also, she has a lot of difficulty locating herself on the "You Are Here" diagrams placed at intervals to help out those lacking in orientation skills. She prefers to be aboveground, w here there are street signs. THE BAR.BER. Even in death he roams the yard in his boxer shorts, plowing the push-mower through Bermuda grass, bullying it against the fence and tree trunks, chipping its twisted blades on the patio's edge. The chalky flint and orange spark of struck concrete floats in the air, tastes like metal, smells like the slow burn of hair on his electric clippers. And smelling it I feel the hot shoe of the shaver as he guided it in a high arc around my ears, then set the sharp toothy edge against my sideburns to trim them square, and how he used his huge stomach to butt the chair and his flat hand palming my head to keep me still, pressing my chin down as he cleaned the ragged wisps of hair along my neck. A fat, inconsolable man, whose skill and pleasure was to clip and shear, to make raw and stubble, all that grew in this world, expose the scalp, the place of roots and nerves, and make vulnerable, there in the double mirrors of his shop, the long stem muscles of our necks. And so we hung below his license in its cheap black frame, above the violet light of the scissors' shed with its glass jars of germicide and the long tapered combs soaking in the blue iridescence. Gruff when he wasn't silent, he was a neighbor to fear, yet we trusted him beyond his anger, beyond his privacy, like a father we could hate, like someone we might kill, though vengeance was always his. He sent us back into the world burning and itching, alive with the horror of closing eyes in the pinkish darkness of his shop and having felt the horsehair brush, talc-filled, cloying, too sweet for boyhood, whisked across the face. - MICHAEL COLLIER . ] ust recently she got thoroughly lost down there; the only good thing that happened was that she discovered a store called The Tacki Shoppe, which sold pink flamingo eggs and joke books about sex in middle age, and bottles of sugar pills labelled Screwital. It also sold small pieces of the Berlin Wall, each in its own little box, with a certif- icate of authenticity included. They cost twelve ninety-five. She bought a piece to put in Eric's stocking: they . still keep up the habit of jokes in their stockings, from when the children were younger. She is not sure Eric will find this gift funny; more likely, he will make some remark about the trivializa- tÏon of history. But the children will be interested The truth is that Marcia secretly wants this piece of the Wall for herself. It's a souvenir for her, not of a place-she has never been to Berlin- but of a time. This is from the Christ- mas the Wall came tumbling down, she will say in later years; to her grand- children, she hopes. Then she will try to remember what year it was. More and more, she is squirrelling away bits of time-a photo here, a letter there; she wishes she had saved more of the children's baby clothes,